> Last month, Bloom and a team of researchers published a study ... one group worked from home two days of the week while the other group came into the office every work day.
Hybrid - coming in to an office 3 days per week - is entirely different from 100% remote where all day-to-day interactions are done virtually and people are spread across time zones.
A few hours is mostly pretty workable. But you get beyond 5/6 or so and it's harder. (Where I last worked US East Coast to Central Europe seemed workable--where the two main engineering facilities were. Anything much beyond that would probably have been hard.)
This is true. However, when you’re trying to build a company that works remotely then asynchronous communications becomes an almost necessary part of that.
Going from in-office to remote in the same time zone is a huge lift, and increases your target employee market from 1 city to 5-6 time zones (ie a quarter of the world).
But developing your company to work across time zones is a much smaller lift and will quadruple the employee target market for the employer from 5-6 time zones to 24 time zones.
If you’ve already made the significant effort to increase your employee access to a quarter of the world, it’s very likely you will make a slight additional effort to extend that to the entire world.
And you don't need WfH to have work spread across time zones. The company I work for and therefore the team I'm on have developers in US Central Time, India Time, and China Time.
I work 100% remotely and I live in a big city, and I miss the social interactions I used to have in the office.
If I were a junior in my first year of working, I would decline any remote offer.
In the first few years, I was enthusiastic about remote working. Now, I am envious of people who work in offices or have public-facing jobs because of the social interactions.
Much as I appreciate not having to commute in 9-5 every day at this point (and am mostly retired anyway), I think I'd pretty much have hated just working from home fresh out of school.
That's one reason the in office vs remote debate is challenging. Working in person with others can be beneficial some times for collaboration and socialization but if it requires a dangerous and environmentally devastating car based commute then those benefits are negated. We shouldn't have to commute long distances in cars to get to the office but most communities are designed in a way that makes it impossible to live close to work.
I wouldn't mind working in the office if it meant walking 15 minutes down the street in the morning but around here I would have to make 4x what I make to live near the office and even then it would be a commute because the offices are sequestered in these maze like office parks with no sidewalks.
So on days I'm in the office it's a choice between a 30 minute drive with terrifyingly bad drivers focused on their cell phones while careening around at 80mph or a peaceful but much longer train ride followed by a 20 minute walk crossing streets with those same dangerous drivers.
I guess it's yet another thing where the root problem is the design of our communities.
>I guess it's yet another thing where the root problem is the design of our communities.
Well, I like living in the country and that means working in the city would be a 1 hour+ commute--whether by train or car.
Funnily enough, I actually lived almost next door to where I worked for about ten years near a suburban office park but people I knew would either perform scary manoeuvres to pick me up on the way into the office or I'd want my car to run a lunchtime errand or go somewhere after work so I didn't walk even though it was only 5-10 minutes.
I've been remote for about 12 years, but now after getting divorced and becoming an empty nester, hybrid seems like a much better idea for me. Too lonely when you are single to work from home all the time.
I also think it would probably be best for most people, not just for socialization, but because most jobs have some level of both collaborative and individualized work. Even though my job is mostly writing code, it is still beneficial to have sessions with peers to brainstorm, design, discuss, etc.
Many people have a partner and/or friends and/or social networks of friends. Trying to simulate that through work relationships will make your lonelier. It's hard to rebuild after a divorce but rebuilding in work relationships will make you feel more hollow as you are building on quicksand and when you lose your job or change jobs you lose that network.
You are better off going to church on Sunday or finding some other network outside of work. Axe throwing is popular. If your job life changes you shouldn't have to rebuild your social network. Diversity of social networks will help you through things better. Putting all your eggs in a fragile basket of at will employment is setting you up for a crash.
I don't think you intended to be condescending with your last comment, but the "go axe throwing" advice that I hear SO, SO, SO OFTEN from WFH advocates is incredibly dismissive.
Between kids, work, and old, comfortable friends, adults tend to be very cliquey and unwilling to open up their friend circles. It is very difficult (not impossible) to make friends as an adult for most people (myself included). The office was an environment that made this _more possible_ (certainly not guaranteed), but people seem hell-bent on making that go away. This is becoming even more difficult with the Meetup scene having eroded over the years in favor of walled-garden Facebook groups.
Speaking of social settings, about this:
> You are better off going to church on Sunday or finding some other network outside of work. Axe throwing is popular. If your job life changes you shouldn't have to rebuild your social network.
If you're not religious, church is 100% a non-starter. If you don't have kids, church is even worse. It's very rare to find intentionally child-free couples at church.
I've also found that the relationships formed through church are just as likely to be "hollow" as those formed at work. (You can also build some very-long-lasting relationships with old workmates; it happens!)
> It is very difficult (not impossible) to make friends as an adult for most people (myself included).
Good to know I'm not alone. It is tough as an adult.
> The office was an environment that made this _more possible_ (certainly not guaranteed)
MOST jobs after I left the "friends" went with it BUT I have a couple of jobs where I did keep some friends. Some have been friends for 20 years, so yes, not impossible.
> If you're not religious, church is 100% a non-starter.
I see the benefits of in-person collaboration, but they're not a panacea and sometimes slow down productivity. I'm a big fan of the quarterly offsite schedule where once a quarter, your team/org/whatever gets together somewhere and hunkers down for a week of intense collaboration. Then you go back home, keep working remote, and have stronger bonds with teammates and realignment in the direction you're going.
I work fully remote, so I get a lot of non-close-friend socialization and "shop talk" from local meetups. It's extracurricular (more work), but I find there are often more diverse topics and challenges to discuss outside of just 1 company. So I was recently at a meetup hosted by [pretty large US tech company] in [city pretty popular with tech workers] and some recruiters for the company were there.
They said they were having challenges recruiting tech workers after a mandatory, full, 5-day-per-week return-to-office. When I friendlily asked what sort of benefits they've seen so far from it, they each spoke about how they personally liked in-person collaboration, the sort of chance encounters you get around the water cooler, etc.
Not that there's acting wrong with that, it's just that I was expecting something along the lines of measurably better business outcomes, while it seemed they had internalized an RTO sales pitch to hiring prospects, which consisted of saying they liked it so much that they wanted it not only for themselves, but for others, too.
That strikes me as a common mandatory RTO reasoning from leadership (I doubt the individual recruiters had much say in the decision): Results? IDK, I just want the other people to be here because I want it.
It seems like a lot of RTO proponents can't comprehend, or maybe don't care, that there are people who don't need to be surrounded by other people all the time, and who work better, and are happier if they are alone.
Let people who want to work in an office work in an office, and let people who want to work from home work from home.
> It seems like a lot of RTO proponents can't comprehend, or maybe don't care, that there are people who don't need to be surrounded by other people all the time, and who work better, and are happier if they are alone.
This is a variation on the classic mismatch between introverts and extroverts, social expectations, and behaviors. It's just concentrated in the RTO vs remote debate.
> Let people who want to work in an office work in an office, and let people who want to work from home work from home.
This, 100%, if you can control for bias. The issue with the true optionality is that remote workers may get passed up for promotion or other opportunities because they're less physically present—even if they're the best fit for the opportunity. That's what makes it difficult to straddle both worlds. I guess one solution would be to have managers, paradoxically, never in the office more than 1-2 days a week to force more explicit interaction via remote conferencing, but that's a weird forcing function.
Maybe the answer to the bias is to have entire teams as either fully in office or fully remote. At a certain level of management abstraction the physical presence wouldn’t be much of a bias anymore, I almost never see my VPs anyway. And for the people in-office trying to communicate with another team, this is not much different than the problem you have anyway with multiple offices even if everyone was in office.
Then you can internally move to the team aligned with your working style. People do this now by switching to a company most aligned with their working style, but obviously this has major drawbacks and we probably don’t need to be that coarse.
> This is a variation on the classic mismatch between introverts and extroverts
The issue isn't the "mismatch", because everyone is different. The issue arises when people who match 1 pattern force others who don't to follow the pattern anyways, particularly when the reasoning is selfish (I like it [because of X], so we're doing it, even if you don't like it).
> The issue with the true optionality is that remote workers may get passed up for promotion or other opportunities because they're less physically present.
A few points to touch upon here:
- While that is indeed sometimes true, it's a problem of that specific company's culture, not of remote work (my current company promotes equally, for example).
- It is indeed extra work to be "noticed" when you're remote, as it requires more than just sitting there and having a face that people can see. For me, this has meant developing myself in terms of delivering results and letting folks know how they're good for the company. IMHO these are pretty universally useful skills in business.
- Not everyone is forever looking for another promotion, so that's another argument for letting them choose.
> I guess one solution would be to have managers, paradoxically, never in the office more than 1-2 days a week to force more explicit interaction via remote conferencing, but that's a weird forcing function
We hold our meetings with a video option, even when a couple people are in the office, and it doesn't feel weird. We are also effective at "huddling" around a screen shared digitally, to quickly swarm a problem.
I have alternatively heard of companies incentivizing optionally hybrid workers to come in 2-3 specific days per week by providing perks like free meals on those days.
You might be the best fit for the opportunity of "spouse" to some amazing, beautiful, intelligent other person out there, but if you refuse to ever show up in person, inevitably, you're going to miss out in favor of someone who will.
I'm introverted to the point that it weirds other people out, and permanent work from home drives me insane. When I do need to talk to someone, I really prefer to see if they're available at their desk and if so, talk with them in person where the "bandwidth" is highest. I do agree that for heads-down type work, it is nice to be able to shut out everything and concentrate.
Pandemic + work-from-home has killed many, many local meetups. It's great that some are still running where you live, but what was a great resource to meet colleagues, learn something useful, hear about open opportunities no longer exists in many places.
When I am 100% in office, my stress goes up, and my productivity goes down. When I'm 100% remote, the same thing eventually happens, but for different reasons. Having the flexibility to come into the office when I want/need to, or stay home when i need to is a really great middle ground where I thrive.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 88.5 ms ] threadHybrid - coming in to an office 3 days per week - is entirely different from 100% remote where all day-to-day interactions are done virtually and people are spread across time zones.
If you’re doing 100% remote why would you limit yourself to the same time zone?
Going from in-office to remote in the same time zone is a huge lift, and increases your target employee market from 1 city to 5-6 time zones (ie a quarter of the world).
But developing your company to work across time zones is a much smaller lift and will quadruple the employee target market for the employer from 5-6 time zones to 24 time zones.
If you’ve already made the significant effort to increase your employee access to a quarter of the world, it’s very likely you will make a slight additional effort to extend that to the entire world.
If I were a junior in my first year of working, I would decline any remote offer.
In the first few years, I was enthusiastic about remote working. Now, I am envious of people who work in offices or have public-facing jobs because of the social interactions.
I wouldn't mind working in the office if it meant walking 15 minutes down the street in the morning but around here I would have to make 4x what I make to live near the office and even then it would be a commute because the offices are sequestered in these maze like office parks with no sidewalks.
So on days I'm in the office it's a choice between a 30 minute drive with terrifyingly bad drivers focused on their cell phones while careening around at 80mph or a peaceful but much longer train ride followed by a 20 minute walk crossing streets with those same dangerous drivers.
I guess it's yet another thing where the root problem is the design of our communities.
Well, I like living in the country and that means working in the city would be a 1 hour+ commute--whether by train or car.
Funnily enough, I actually lived almost next door to where I worked for about ten years near a suburban office park but people I knew would either perform scary manoeuvres to pick me up on the way into the office or I'd want my car to run a lunchtime errand or go somewhere after work so I didn't walk even though it was only 5-10 minutes.
I also think it would probably be best for most people, not just for socialization, but because most jobs have some level of both collaborative and individualized work. Even though my job is mostly writing code, it is still beneficial to have sessions with peers to brainstorm, design, discuss, etc.
You are better off going to church on Sunday or finding some other network outside of work. Axe throwing is popular. If your job life changes you shouldn't have to rebuild your social network. Diversity of social networks will help you through things better. Putting all your eggs in a fragile basket of at will employment is setting you up for a crash.
Between kids, work, and old, comfortable friends, adults tend to be very cliquey and unwilling to open up their friend circles. It is very difficult (not impossible) to make friends as an adult for most people (myself included). The office was an environment that made this _more possible_ (certainly not guaranteed), but people seem hell-bent on making that go away. This is becoming even more difficult with the Meetup scene having eroded over the years in favor of walled-garden Facebook groups.
Speaking of social settings, about this:
> You are better off going to church on Sunday or finding some other network outside of work. Axe throwing is popular. If your job life changes you shouldn't have to rebuild your social network.
If you're not religious, church is 100% a non-starter. If you don't have kids, church is even worse. It's very rare to find intentionally child-free couples at church.
I've also found that the relationships formed through church are just as likely to be "hollow" as those formed at work. (You can also build some very-long-lasting relationships with old workmates; it happens!)
Good to know I'm not alone. It is tough as an adult.
> The office was an environment that made this _more possible_ (certainly not guaranteed)
MOST jobs after I left the "friends" went with it BUT I have a couple of jobs where I did keep some friends. Some have been friends for 20 years, so yes, not impossible.
> If you're not religious, church is 100% a non-starter.
Yep, I'm non-religious, non-starter for me
They said they were having challenges recruiting tech workers after a mandatory, full, 5-day-per-week return-to-office. When I friendlily asked what sort of benefits they've seen so far from it, they each spoke about how they personally liked in-person collaboration, the sort of chance encounters you get around the water cooler, etc.
Not that there's acting wrong with that, it's just that I was expecting something along the lines of measurably better business outcomes, while it seemed they had internalized an RTO sales pitch to hiring prospects, which consisted of saying they liked it so much that they wanted it not only for themselves, but for others, too.
That strikes me as a common mandatory RTO reasoning from leadership (I doubt the individual recruiters had much say in the decision): Results? IDK, I just want the other people to be here because I want it.
Let people who want to work in an office work in an office, and let people who want to work from home work from home.
This is a variation on the classic mismatch between introverts and extroverts, social expectations, and behaviors. It's just concentrated in the RTO vs remote debate.
> Let people who want to work in an office work in an office, and let people who want to work from home work from home.
This, 100%, if you can control for bias. The issue with the true optionality is that remote workers may get passed up for promotion or other opportunities because they're less physically present—even if they're the best fit for the opportunity. That's what makes it difficult to straddle both worlds. I guess one solution would be to have managers, paradoxically, never in the office more than 1-2 days a week to force more explicit interaction via remote conferencing, but that's a weird forcing function.
Then you can internally move to the team aligned with your working style. People do this now by switching to a company most aligned with their working style, but obviously this has major drawbacks and we probably don’t need to be that coarse.
> The issue with the true optionality is that remote workers may get passed up for promotion or other opportunities because they're less physically present.
A few points to touch upon here:
- While that is indeed sometimes true, it's a problem of that specific company's culture, not of remote work (my current company promotes equally, for example).
- It is indeed extra work to be "noticed" when you're remote, as it requires more than just sitting there and having a face that people can see. For me, this has meant developing myself in terms of delivering results and letting folks know how they're good for the company. IMHO these are pretty universally useful skills in business.
- Not everyone is forever looking for another promotion, so that's another argument for letting them choose.
> I guess one solution would be to have managers, paradoxically, never in the office more than 1-2 days a week to force more explicit interaction via remote conferencing, but that's a weird forcing function
We hold our meetings with a video option, even when a couple people are in the office, and it doesn't feel weird. We are also effective at "huddling" around a screen shared digitally, to quickly swarm a problem.
I have alternatively heard of companies incentivizing optionally hybrid workers to come in 2-3 specific days per week by providing perks like free meals on those days.
Pandemic + work-from-home has killed many, many local meetups. It's great that some are still running where you live, but what was a great resource to meet colleagues, learn something useful, hear about open opportunities no longer exists in many places.